About this Event

The intersection between community building, places and creative efforts to ingite dialogue and transformation, is a vibrant and interesting field of study! It offers ways to challenge traditional and formal citizen engagement, it's cost-efficient and it pulls headlines when done right!

We invite urban planners, students, architects, social and cultural entrepreneurs and policy-makers to experience and explore these concepts in full effect with some of the worlds leading experts!

These four experts will take you through one of the most colorful parts of transforming places bottom-up, building on several SDG's especially 11.3 about involving civil society in the planning and development of urban spaces.

The presentation will include a talk and several workshops, engaging with the artists and surroundings of the neighboring mural festival, Meeting of Styles Copenhagen! 50 International artists have been confirmed from a wide range of countries from all over the world. So be ready to network, ask, listen, brainstorm and challenge the ideas that are brought up.

You will end up with new perspectives, tangible strategies for community engagement, concepts and good-practice to support policy-planning, ways to actively work with places in need of love, care and attention.

We wan't to dig deeper into the Creative city brand, and show how to make room for communities to drive processes themselves!

11:00 | Dr. Ricardo Lopes and Professor Pedro Costa

Ricardo and Pedro talks about the recent institutionalization of urban art in metropolitan area of Lisbon. Specifically they develop the presentation around the cities: Lisbon and Barreiro.

Barreiro is an old industrial city in the other side of the Tagus river, where the graffiti and the mural assume a huge importance along the twenty century (fighting against fascism, labor conditions, social segregation, etc).

Recently a new generations of "recognized" urban artists have been using the city as based to their work (as Vhils), putting the city on the map of international circuits of urban art.

Particular attention is directed to the roles of user-generated media and civic-minded creative community members in capacitating and continually energising street art as creative placemaking outside Australia's major cities.

13:00 | Lunch with the artists at Axeltorv

13:45 | Cynthia Nikitin

Creative placemaking as an integrative approach to urban planning and community building that stimulates local economies and leads to increased innovation, cultural diversity, and civic engagement.

Since creativity fuels place value, the benefits of using arts and culture to tap into a place's unique character extend well beyond the art world. Across sectors and at all levels, today's leaders and policymakers are increasingly recognizing how arts-based Placemaking initiatives can simultaneously advance their missions in transportation, housing, employment, health care, environmental sustainability, and education.

Cynthia will be providing a scan of creative placemaking projects that focus on murals and street art and how the engagement of youth, people experiencing homelessness and communities of color in creative placemaking projects supports broader goals of job skill development, public safety, literacy, and social well-being.

15:15 | Steffen Gray

Steffen will be focusing on the dynamics of Meeting of Styles Copenhagen, and the exchange of momentum between the Main festival and the smaller events in the disadvantaged suburbs.

Being open call manager for the largest street art- and graffiti festival worldwide is a rather unique position - one that calls for exploring how this momentum is able to serve society in a broader sense.

In this short presentation, before we all join the festival, Steffen outlines some of the important components that brings social and urban change from the festival to the Suburbs - And the feedback from the suburbs to the midtown-located festival.